Dearing Award for Tim Brailsford

Tim Brailsford's application for a Dearing Award has been successful. The panel judged a large number of submissions of a very high standard, and chose his to be among the winners.

The Dearing award has focussed upon the work that Tim has done since 2008 – both in UK and in Malaysia. This is in several areas:

Blended learning
Looking at ways of using new technology to improve the student learning experience. This is generally using videos delivered in a “virtual e-space”, together with mechanisms for ensuring that the students watch those videos, and have a highly interactive experience. Tim also experimented with various modalities of teaching – including green screen virtual lectures, interviews with subject experts and discussions between different staff members to embody a form of vicarious learning (learning by watching people learn).

Shared-resource teaching
Since he has been in Malaysia, Tim has become very interested in running modules on different campuses in synchrony, and using new technologies to ensure that the resources are shared between the modules and the students on different campuses can interact with each other.

Activity-based learning
If more and more of the core learning is to be delivered online, real life timetable slots can be freed up for various activities (e.g. games, roleplaying and group activities), all of which is aimed at reinforcing the core online material.Learning environments and infrastructure. Since arriving in Malaysia, Tim have got very interested in the environments within which students learn. He is the campus e-learning champion, and is drafting an e-learning strategy for UNMC, which is very much focussed upon moving away from old-style labs and preparing for the “post PC” world – where almost all students have their own computers and access online resources through increasingly diverse devices (tablets, smartphones etc.). He has redesigned the CS IT lab in Malaysia to create a quite radical flexible learning environment – which does provide computers for those who want them, but generally makes the assumption that students prefer to work on their own machines.